653 papers
Microbiology explores the invisible world of tiny life forms that shape our health, environment, and even the air we breathe. From bacteria and viruses to fungi and parasites, this field investigates how these microscopic organisms interact with us and each other, driving everything from disease outbreaks to beneficial fermentation processes. Understanding them is crucial for developing new medicines, improving food safety, and combating global health challenges.
At Gist.Science, we make the latest discoveries in this dynamic field accessible to everyone. We process every new preprint uploaded to bioRxiv in this category, transforming dense academic findings into both clear, plain-language explanations and detailed technical summaries. This ensures that whether you are a student, a researcher, or simply curious, you can grasp the significance of cutting-edge science without getting lost in jargon.
Below are the most recent papers in microbiology, curated and summarized directly from the bioRxiv server to keep you at the forefront of discovery.
This study identifies EBV-activated JunB as a critical dependency factor in lymphoblastoid B cells that drives proliferation by repressing the cell cycle inhibitor p18INK4c via an LMP1-NF-κB signaling axis, highlighting JunB as a promising therapeutic target for EBV-associated lymphoproliferative disorders.
This study demonstrates that among four repurposed compounds tested, quercetin (enhanced by ascorbic acid), isoquercetin, and zafirlukast exhibit potent dose-dependent therapeutic antiviral activity against measles virus in vitro, supporting their further evaluation as candidate treatments.
This study reveals that while thogotoviruses utilize a distal duplex structure for RNA synthesis, Oz virus and Dhori virus differ in their reliance on specific base pairs at positions 5'12/3'11 within this structure to regulate segment-specific promoter activity, suggesting a genus-wide divergence in transcriptional control mechanisms.
This study demonstrates that maternal antibiotic treatment during lactation alters the infant gut microbiome and metabolome, increases antimicrobial resistance genes, and is associated with higher infant BMI, with these effects exacerbated by formula supplementation.
This study demonstrates that sub-inhibitory measurements of antimicrobial drug combinations frequently fail to predict their interactions at clinically relevant inhibitory concentrations due to concentration- and ratio-dependent shifts in synergy or antagonism, necessitating pharmacodynamic assessments across the full range of therapeutic doses.
This study reveals that *Actinoplanes missouriensis* zoospores achieve record-breaking swimming speeds of approximately 500 body lengths per second through a unique propulsion mechanism involving a synchronously rotating, anterior body-wrapping flagellar bundle, demonstrating that supramolecular flagellar organization rather than motor speed alone dictates the upper limits of bacterial motility.
This study demonstrates that C57BL/6J IFNAR-/- mice serve as a suitable model for Sudan virus infection, exhibiting rapid lethality, widespread systemic viral dissemination, and a cytokine storm-like inflammatory response that supports their use in investigating filovirus pathogenesis and immune dysregulation.
SCCmecExtractor is a lightweight, open-source Python toolkit that identifies and extracts complete Staphylococcal Cassette Chromosome (SCC) elements, including those lacking methicillin resistance genes, from whole-genome assemblies across diverse staphylococcal species, thereby revealing a substantial reservoir of non-mec SCC diversity previously overlooked by existing typing tools.
This study introduces PInc, a replication-centered classification framework based on conserved winged-helix domains in replication initiation proteins, which resolves deep evolutionary relationships and reveals the global diversity of nearly 100,000 bacterial plasmids, overcoming the limitations of traditional host-based and nucleotide-similarity typing schemes.
This study characterizes a set of 25 orthogonal constitutive promoters with graded expression strengths derived from synthetic variants of the PconII promoter, demonstrating their utility for genetic engineering across diverse model and non-model cyanobacterial strains to support biotechnological applications.